The Imperial Radch series is a relatively simple little space opera, in the classic sense of the term. Spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years, multiple star systems and a variety of cultural influences, it’s a series firmly rooted in the tropes of its genre. While Ancillary Justice does wonderful things with those ideas and concepts, building a surprisingly compelling setting and cast, the series as a whole is somewhat underwhelming. Lacking the bombast of James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse or the vision of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space, Imperial Radch sits in an uncomfortable place between top-tier SF and the middle of the road dross that clogs the shelves at Barnes and Noble.

Ancillary Justice follows Breq, also known as Justice of Toren, One Esk, a surviving fragment of the controlling AI of an interstellar warship. A portion of Justice examines Breq’s life as the ship Justice of Toren before it was destroyed, while the main narrative picks up after Breq has been on her own for years, executing a long plan that might make up for some of the mistakes she made as Justice of Toren. The PoV snaps back and forth between the present and the past until we witness the moment of Justice of Toren’s destruction. After which we shift entirely to Breq on her mission of justice and vengeance.

Leckie does some very interesting things in this first book, from exploring the mental processes of artificial intelligences to cultural comparisons between various offshoots of humanity in this distant future. One particular aspect that has received a lot of critical attention is the genderless language of the Radch Empire. Gaining her positive comparisons to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Leckie deliberately created a culture that ignores gender, referring to all individuals as ‘she/her’ in the book, though it is assumed that the actual word being used is a gender neutral pronoun that is being translated into English as ‘she’. In spite of the praise she has received, the comparison isn’t actually valid. Le Guin’s Gethen are actually androgynous in both personality and gender, whereas the Radch still have genders, but don’t culturally recognize that those genders are pertinent and, as a side effect, are bad at identifying gender in other cultures.

In spite of the invalid comparisons, Leckie’s Radch Empire is a very interesting society to read about. Based on the protective necessity of conquest and ruled by a single collective intelligence disturbed through hundreds of clone bodies, Radch is, in many ways, a highly likely configuration of interstellar empire. Leckie does a wonderful job of exploring the mechanisms of a culture that is fundamentally oriented around conquest, from integrating new cultures into the society of the Radch, to the economic and political realities of an ever-expanding sphere of territory.

Justice concludes with a revelation that derails Breq’s quest and shifts her role from lone wolf-style agent of vengeance to a hybrid detective/paladin with the directive to maintain order throughout the Radch and the authority and autonomy to do so without oversight. Which is where the narrative picks back up in Ancillary Sword.Sword’s storyline is much less compelling than Justice’s, partly because this new version of Breq is much less interesting. Stripped of her original mission and, inadvertently, her nemesis, Breq flounders as a character. Leckie seems to have trouble aligning the character with her new mission and the story loses much of its forward momentum without Breq’s singular drive, advancing more by random chance than anything else. Breq stumbles onto ongoing problems in a new star system and stumbles onto solutions to those problems without any apparent effort.

Part of the issue with Sword is the tonal shift of the narrative from ‘I’m on a mission’ to ‘space detective story.’ There were aspects of Justice that could have been detective stories, but they were glossed over in favor of building Breq’s motivation and personality. There were times in Sword when I felt like I wasn’t even reading the same series, let alone a direct sequel. I suppose it is possible that the book is suffering from some sort of variant on the middle book syndrome that sometimes crop up in longer SF/Fantasy series, but it honestly doesn’t feel like Leckie is building towards anything either. The antagonists in Sword are particularly uninspiring, lacking both the menace and the ambition that Anaander Mianaai had in Justice. It feels like a bait and switch, where the supervillain we’d been hoping would receive their just comeuppance was suddenly replaced by the used car salesman down the road. Not nice to be sure, but not worthy of epic justice either. Leckie also gets bogged down in rehashing worldbuilding elements throughout the book, taking too much time elaborating on existing concepts and not introducing enough new material.

When I was drafting this review, I initially wanted to review each book separately to give the credit to Justice without dissuading the reader from the greater Imperial Radch series. But I kept coming back to talking about the shortcomings of the second book. So, am I doing a disservice to Ancillary Justice by combining its review with that of its substantially less fulfilling successor? Or would separating the reviews be robbing my readers of the more complete picture? I still don’t know the answer, but for Imperial Radch, I couldn’t have the conversation I wanted to have without discussing both books. Regardless, I will definitely be reading Ancillary Mercy when it drops, and I hope that Sword’s lackluster write-up won’t deter you from doing the same. There is a kernel of quality here that should be praised regardless of the individual pieces in the sequence.

Cairo is, in many ways, a prototype for G. Willow Wilson’s later novel, Alif the Unseen. They are stories of clashing cultures. Both the complex internal clash between Islamic hardliners and the culturally diverse youth of the Middle East, and the more external, if no less complex conflict between encroaching western culture and the entrenched lifestyles of Muslims. By necessity, Cairo is more spare, crashing through a much simpler plot at breakneck pace, but it manages to hit the same powerful notes that Alif does.

The comic starts as the story of Ashraf, an Egyptian drug smuggler who makes regular runs across the border into Israel. On one such run, he wrecks his car on a stoned camel (exactly as funny as it sounds), loses his shipment and ends up stealing a hookah from his employer to make some fast cash. But the hookah is home to a jinn, Shams, a beneficent creature who owns a box that could give control of the entire Middle East to anyone who possesses it.

Drawn into this drama are Shaheed, a Lebanese-American who intends to become a suicide bomber; Kate, a privileged white girl trying to escape her Orange County roots; and Ali, a journalist who struggles to tell the truth in defiance of the Egyptian government and Western ambivalence. Wilson does an excellent job of fleshing out each of these characters, even in the relatively limited space of the graphic novel format. So much so that it’s hard to identify who the real protagonist is. Shaheed’s journey is the most transformative, but Ashraf and Kate are much more relatable. There is a fifth ‘protagonist,’ an Israeli special forces solider named Tova, but she is a much simpler character whose arc is tied up too closely with Ashraf’s to be interesting on its own.

For me, the draw of a story like this lies in the juxtaposition of contemporary cultural understanding and the mythological/historical elements. Shams isn’t interesting because he’s a jinn; he’s interesting because he’s a jinn who has fully adapted to the modern world. Rather than play up the traditional conflict between magic and all things modern, Wilson choses a more interesting course. One where the ancient and occult are actually fighting to shape the present and the future.

Wilson makes great use of her understanding of Arabic and Islamic culture to inform her worldbuilding and magic systems. Again, she uses some of the unique properties of Arabic to remind the reader that the culture of the Middle East was, and still can be, progressive and intellectual. Like in Alif, the message in Cairo boils down to a question of freedom and understanding. We in the west tend to paint all Muslim culture with the same, overbroad brush, reducing dozens of rich cultures down to a few abusive stereotypes. Wilson doesn’t deny that these stereotypes exist, but reminds us that outside of extremist groups, the people on the ground are just that; people.

Cairo unfolds quickly and succinctly in M.K. Perker’s very detailed black and white panels. While the style does fit the pacing and tone of the story, I felt that that art ultimately failed to stand out in my particular library of comic book art. It isn’t bad at all, just not particularly noteworthy. The final versions of the pages, used in my collected printing, are quite nice, but the heavy use of shading sometimes muddies the detail-rich style of Perker’s art. Perker is careful to avoid stereotypical depictions of Egyptians and other Arabic cultures, with the notable exceptions of some of the supernatural villains. These draw on those visual tropes and distort them to create the most visually impressive, and disturbing images of the whole comic.

While Cairo is an older graphic novel, I couldn’t help but note the timeliness of my reading of it. As Europe and the US struggle with how to deal with citizens leaving to join militant Islamist groups, and leaders thought the Middle East, including Egypt’s own Grand Imam, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, call for reformation and the curtailment of Islamist extremism, Shaheed’s story seems particularly relevant. Wilson’s hopeful portrayal of his journey is poignant precisely because he overcomes the blinders of faith and personal depression. At risk of repeating myself almost word for word, I wonder how effective extremist recruiters would be if we treated each other a little bit more like people, and less like the shadows cast on the wall by the media.

Ready Player One is one of those books that’s been sitting on the shelves at Barnes and Nobel taunting me with nearly universal acclaim for longer than I care to think about. Not only that, but it falls clearly into my ‘near future, speculative fiction’ bailiwick and even focuses on video game culture, so I really have no excuse as to why I’m only just now adding it to my library. And that’s a shame, because it really is quite good.

Any returning readers will recall that I intensely dislike reading books with good press or recommendations, mostly because it means that I’m suddenly holding the author (and the book) to much higher standards than are reasonable, but also because it messes with the way that I think about writing these reviews. I feel pressure to generate ‘original’ criticism, which puts my tendency to nitpick into overdrive.

On first (and second) look, Ready Player One is a fairly boilerplate adventure novel, set in the escapist virtual reality of a disappointing version of the future. I deliberately avoid using the word dystopian here, because it is overused, but also because this version of 2044 is harsh and depressing, but not actively oppressive. It is a version of the future that my generation is supposed to worry about and the one before mine created with rampant consumerism and nary a thought given to the limits of supply. Into this world is born Wade. Going by the webnomen Parzival, Wade is immediately recognizable as the kid who is isolated by his mind and his incredibly geeky array of interests. And even in a future where life takes place entirely in an online virtual world, he still resonates with the gamers and fandom members as someone whose gifts seem wasted on trivial, or silly things.

But Parzival’s geeky tendencies pay off when he figures out the first part of a multi-billion dollar treasure hunt set in motion by the creator of the virtual world that everyone inhabits. At stake are an incredible fortune and control of the company that has become the only venue for business, art, culture and free expression in the world.

With the stakes sufficiently raised, Cline takes us on a whirlwind ride as Parzival, along with a small group of tenuous friends and allies, races to find the treasure before an evil corporation can claim it for themselves. The story starts slow, but quickly accelerates, alternating between swaths of geeky trivia and brief bursts of action. Sometimes indulging in both at the same time. The narrative is solid, pushing readers along without feeling like its rushing. The level of explanation on the puzzles is robust but, at least for me, didn’t feel alienating or off-putting. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you care about/are interested in 80s movies, classic video games and general geekery.

Even the romantic subplot, which is so often mishandled, comes off as sweet and important to the story. Though Art3mis is an extraordinarily unrealistic version of a love interest, who only avoids feeling out of place by virtue of the bizarre personalities that would be drawn to a treasure hunt of this nature. Cline gets into more trouble later on when Wade suddenly develops real world skills and abilities for a 3rd act plot twist that feels both unnecessary and completely implausible. Parzival becomes increasingly ‘Mary Sue’ like as the story continues, which is excusable in an adventure story where the character gains confidence and skills as he progresses in his quest. But that rule of thumb doesn’t apply here because Wade’s adventures don’t apply to his real body. Even with the shoehorned physical training program taken into consideration, Cline seems to forget his protagonist had no meatspace experience to speak of.

But we can forgive a little aggrandizement in the services of a more compelling heroic arc. We can forgive quite a bit if the hero reminds us of ourselves and validates our more quirky hobbies. Which is at the core of why Ready Player One is so compelling, at least to me. It is a story by geeks, for geeks that makes us feel a little better about ourselves if we’re feeling down on our hobbies. It also happens to be a compelling modern quest narrative that could only exist in the context of video games. Mission Complete.

As I have written before, I find book recommendations to be more annoying than useful (which raises some interesting questions about why I write book reviews). There are so many variables involved in what makes any given book appealing to a given person that, without a history of literary compatibility, it is almost impossible guarantee that any two people will like the same book. Still, every so often I’ll follow up on a recommendation or a particularly good review from a source that I like and it won’t disappoint me. Lexicon not only did not disappoint, it wildly exceeded my expectations.

Lexicon takes place in a world where “Poets” have been the real power hidden in the shadow of history. These individuals, possessed of extraordinary willpower and a set of linguistic tools, are able to command people by speaking a few key words that bypass our conscious minds and force us to obey. The idea on its own is fascinating, drawing on shades of Neal Stephenson’s secret histories and J.K. Rowling’s ‘school for special people’ concept.

The book is a wonderfully brisk read, snapping back and forth between Wil, a man with false memories caught in a power play between Poets, and Emily, a street kid who shows at least some potential to be a Poet and is inducted into a school to learn how to control people with words. Wil’s story reads like a Robert Ludlum novel, all chase scenes, helicopters and explosions. Emily’s is more intellectually thrilling, with dense interpersonal conflicts and student intrigue, but, surprisingly, no less page turning. The majority of the book is wrapped up in these two stories, and if it had stuck to that formula, I really wouldn’t have any complaints.

Where things start to break down is a twist that basically removes Emily as a protagonist. The shape of the story changes, relying more heavily on Wil to keep the pace up and his arc isn’t quite up to the task. The conclusion is by no means boring or dull, it just doesn’t hold together as well as the rest of the piece. There are also some specific plot quibbles that I could pick at, but they are all tied up in the larger issues of this last section.

While some might complain that the novel is too short, or that there isn’t enough time to really get into the material, I tend to disagree. While there might be value in another story set in the world of Lexicon, Barry’s expertly paced story does rely on the brevity of the book. When I finished the book, I wanted more, but I also recognized that this particular story had been told and there wasn’t any more I needed from the characters or the plot.

Now I have spent more time picking the book apart than I have praising it, but it really is quite good speculative fiction. The tone, pacing and concept are all spot on, which is more than I can say for most of the books I give rave reviews to. There’s something very compelling about Barry’s Poets and the world they inhabit, although it was unclear to me what their long term goals were. Other than living like kings, of course. There is a mountain of untapped potential and ideas in the concept, so I imagine either a sequel or a somewhat respectful rip-off is somewhere in the works.

Lexicon is a wonderful little read that really shouldn’t be relegated to the SF/Fantasy section of the book store. It has broad appeal a clever concept that bibliophiles will appreciate all the more for its close links to reading and the understanding of words and language. Regardless of little faults, Lexicon has everything you might want from good speculative fiction, and that is quite an achievement.

Sergei Lukyanenko ostensibly drew his Watches series to a conclusion with Last Watch, but almost six years later he released a fifth book. New Watch is a very different kind of novel than its predecessors. It draws inspiration from other contemporary and urban fantasies, most notably the Harry Potter series. There is a greater emphasis on the mechanics of the world’s magic system, answering some questions from previous novels, but shifting the tone of the series away from the cerebral contemplation of the battle between good and evil, towards a more action-oriented adventure. Some of Lukyanenko’s trademark musings remain, but New Watch is clearly written for a slightly different, more global audience than the rest of the pentalogy.

Where Last Watch dealt with the cycle of life and death, New Watch is primarily concerned with the nature of the Twilight, the origins of magic and the quirks of prophesy. The story opens with our tried and true Anton witnessing the awakening of a nascent Light prophet and the accompanying arrival of a mysterious figure called The Tiger. A spontaneous manifestation of the Twilight, The Tiger hunts new prophets and kills them unless they are able to pronounce their primary prediction aloud to an ordinary human. Seeking to save a fellow Light mage, Anton takes up the mantle of defending the boy prophet, and inadvertently pits himself against magic itself in a fight for the future of Otherkind and humanity.

Lukyanenko’s explorations of the nature of prophesy and its tendency towards self-fulfillment make up the bulk of the intellectual meat of New Watch. Throughout Russian folklore, fate plays a strong role as the immutable guide of the lives of those with power, and Lukyanenko’s take on prophesy reflects that cultural trope. In sharp contrast to the very American concept of manifest destiny and carving your own path through an adversarial world, the prophesies of New Watch resist struggles and even transform efforts to thwart them into events that only ensure their fulfillment. Anton’s own efforts to unravel the mystery surrounding The Tiger and the Twilight only serve to bring about new layers of prophesies.

I find it difficult to determine if Lukyanenko’s style in New Watch is good change or a bad change. As a reviewer, I am inclined to believe it has to be one or the other. But in practice, the novel is still ‘good,’ for whatever value you may assign that descriptor. The greater focus on action and the details of the Watches’ magic systems undermine some of what I thought Lukyanenko was working towards, but at the same time there is something valuable about the broader view in New Watch. The addition of watches in the U.K. and East Asia add significant flavor, as well as broadening Anton’s traditional Russian viewpoints and forcing him to examine problems from new perspectives.

The greatest improvement in my mind is Lukyanenko’s treatment of his female characters. The return of Arina is very welcome and Anton’s own daughter plays a major role in the unfolding events. He still has a tendency to write ‘Women’ instead of people who happen to be female, but Arina is given a much more reasonable character arc in this book and feels closer to the powerful, unpredictable witch we met in Twilight Watch.

New Watch should not be considered required reading for the rest of The Watches series. It is a strong book that requires the background built in its prequels to stand, but it doesn’t add anything truly necessary to the sequence as a whole. Instead, it reads like an awkward coda, not quite a book written just for the sake of having a sequel, but not motivated entirely by the needs of the greater story arc. I still enjoyed it, but I can understand a purist’s desire to avoid the book.

For those of you who don’t know, Denver is home to the largest single comic book store in the world. I didn’t know this either until a few months ago when a friend of mine blew into town from Boston and we went. The warehouse used to be a clearing house for cross-country comic shipping and at some point Mile High Comics claimed it, along with the considerable overstock and turned it into 45,000 square feet of comic book nerd wet dream. While we were there, I found myself drooling over collector’s editions of Chew omnibus volumes and an essential guide to the Top Cow universe, but the only thing I walked out with was this quirky little Vertigo title. At the register, the clerk on duty looked the hardcover volume over and gave me an audible “Huh,” which pretty much sums up my experience with the book.

Set in the near future, A.D.D. follows Lionel, a top tier gamer who is part of an unusual reality show/experiment. Raised from birth to play games, test technology and generally be archetypal internet brats, these kids enjoy a life of luxury and media saturation, and in return act as mascots for their corporate owners. For Lionel and his friends, it seems like paradise, but Lionel still has questions: what happens when they ‘graduate?’ And why can he ‘see’ things no one else can?

A blurb on the back cover bills A.D.D. a “part social sci-fi and part X-Men for the Playstation generation.” Personally I don’t really feel the X-Men vibe, but the social commentary is in full effect. Written by Douglass Rushkoff, a prominent American media theorist, the book is almost overloaded with cutting analysis of our digital generation. Kids in the Division are socially maladjusted because of overwhelming media saturation, regressing to more animalistic behavior patterns or quite simply unable to recognize reality. Or perhaps worse, they sometimes see reality too clearly. Lionel’s gift for information processing gives him insight into the motives of those around him, from the subtle visual messages of advertisements, to the facial expressions and body language of his captors. But this just sets him further apart, like a Cassandra, cursed with sights that no one else can, or wants, to see.

The depth of the commentary and the references of Rushkoff’s larger body of work actually get in the way of the smaller story of Lionel and his friends. Tapping into some of the well explored tropes of ‘-punk’ fiction, A.D.D. pits the kids against their controlling corporate overlords. But the conflict of the story feels rushed in places and ill-defined in others. The primary arc is complicated by the addition of a do-gooder journalist with questionable motives, and the overly complicated origin story of the A.D.D. kids themselves. The end is also supremely unsatisfying. It feels tacked on and doesn’t actually resolve any of the bigger issues the book tried to address in the last couple of pages.

The characters themselves feel a bit stronger. Lionel is kind of whiney for a protagonist, but his vulnerabilities make him more likable than some of the other kids. Kasinda, the token female on the team, actually comes across as a stronger character than Lionel and would have made a much more interesting PoV character. She ends up providing most of the drive that keeps the plot moving, making Lionel feel extraneous. Other characters, like Karl and Takai, are less well drawn, but fill important emotional niches for the story. Karl is the big brother with all the answers until he graduates, and Takai is the cautionary tale, a kid so maladjusted he can’t separate games from reality.

The art is also quite good. One of the luxuries of shorter, limited run comics is the ability to hold onto an artist or team long enough to establish a visual style and tone, and A.D.D. has those in spades. The clean lines of the Division home and the various virtual spaces are wonderful, and help the kids’ distinguishing features stand out more. It also creates visual clash between the irregularities of the children and the extreme control of the Nextgen Corporation. A few scenes seem to have been ripped straight from the Battle School of Ender’sGame, but there’s plenty of visual originality here too.

There are a lot of interesting elements to A.D.D. and certainly some topics worth considering as we expose kids to more and more unfiltered media every day. But the graphic novel is just too weak to carry the weight of all those ideas. Whether it was too complex for its very short length, or just needed someone sterner handling the plotting, I can’t really say. It would be very interesting to see another author, like Brian K. Vaughn, take up this concept and run with it. Until that happens, A.D.D. is an intriguing, but ultimately disappointing foray into the psychology of video game culture.

So, I spent a really unreasonable amount of time waiting for and then looking for the Harper paperback release of Last Watch. I waited so long that the fifth book in the series was published stateside and my copy actually started to gather dust on my shelf. Eventually I contacted Harper Collins which prompted a very curt autoreply informing me that they didn’t have the publication rights. Although the Random House imprint they directed me to doesn’t seem to have the U.S. rights either, so…

Last Watch is the conclusion of all the storylines explored by The Watches books so far. Mysteries are solved, questions are answered, and actions are (somewhat) justified. The stakes are higher than ever, with friends pitted against each other and alliances formed from the most unlikely combinations. Through it all, Lukyanenko maintains his cerebral approach to storytelling, blending action, tension and philosophical exploration almost seamlessly and reminding us that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are rarely the simple constructs we assume them to be.

The novel opens with a murder in Edinburgh where the victim’s blood was drained. While this would appear to signify a simple vampire attack, Anton Gorodetsky, newly elevated higher magician of the Night Watch, is once again dispatched to investigate. What he finds in Scotland kicks off the largest conflict the magical world has seen since World War II. A mad alliance of some of the most powerful Light and Dark Others are seeking a way to way to bring back the dead, but their quest may destroy everything in the process.

The strength of The Watches books has always been their grey approach to morality. Here, Lukyanenko pushes that theme to the forefront with the alliance of a Dark Vampire, a Light Enchantress and a mage from the Inquisition, who ostensibly ride above the struggles of good and evil. The core conflict shifts from the power brokering and subtle maneuvering of the first three books to an outright war between a collection of agitators and those who need to maintain the status quo. This change throws new light on Anton, his Night Watch and the entire sequence of events leading up to Last Watch.

As our window into these events, Anton’s sudden jump from mid-level agent to top-tier battle magician also changes our perspective on the new conflict. His slightly maverick ideas suddenly have the weight of power but are still untarnished by the cynicism that plagues the upper echelons of both Watches. In other words, he is an idealist, but one with enough common sense to balance his responsibility to his duty and his obligation to his morals.

While these core changes to Lukyanenko’s storytelling are refreshingly dynamic in a way that the series really needed to continue past Twilight Watch, some of the elements I’ve really come to enjoy from the books are noticeably absent. The political jockeying of the Day and Night Watches takes a back seat to the more pressing concerns of a real crisis. This missing intrigue has always been part of the draw to The Watches books, and its absence is noticeable, but not prohibitively bad.

Another minor problem is the sheer volume of callbacks to previous storylines. Dozens of old characters and events are referenced or reintroduced to help tie up lose narratives, or justify them in the context of the final grand plot. But all these references come at the price of less robust storytelling and a number of strong characters who languish in relative obscurity, including, once again, Anton’s wife and higher enchantress Svetlana. Although Lukyanenko finally gets around to some gender balancing in the form of the brilliant and capable female antagonist running the show on the other side.

Ultimately, Last Watch is a different kind of story and required a different kind of style to tell it, so these complaints aren’t actually criticisms of the narrative (except for the Sevtlana one). They are acknowledgments of Last Watch’s necessary departures from the familiar mold of the series, and a warning that die-hard fans might not be as comfortable with this entry. It is still a phenomenal piece of urban fantasy and well worth the read.

As a coda, Lukyanenko’s references to Russian history and folklore prompted me to pick up a pretty solid collection of Russian Magic Tales, which I am currently reading. There is some fascinating material here, from Baba Yaga, the greatest of the wicked witch archetypes, to more modern, WWII era folklore that strides the enormous gap between fairytales and ghost stories. More importantly, these stories illuminate some of the very ‘Russian’ ideas that permeate The Watches books. I probably won’t do a full review of Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, but I will give it a stamp of recommended reading if you really enjoy Sergei Lukyanenko’s works.

Count to a Trillion is a strange sort of novel. It seems primarily dedicated to avoiding any kind of resolution to any of the narratives it establishes and finding other literary ways to annoy me. Poor characterization, egregious technobabble and obnoxious timeskips are just a few of the book’s many sins. And yet, there is an interesting and ambitious concept at its core. Ultimately, I think the novel falls short of its goals, but it takes us on what could be the start of an intriguing ride.

Count to a Trillion opens an unspecified amount of time in the future. The Earth has been ravaged by non-nuclear global war and racial strife. These events have left the Indosphere and Hispanosphere in control of much of the world. Born in the relative backwater of the southern United States, Menelaus Illation Montrose grows up as a judicial gun-for-hire, but hides a unique secret: a phenomenal gift for higher mathematics. Pressganged into an once-in-a-lifetime expedition to examine an alien artifact orbiting a tantalizing source of free energy, Menelaus subjects himself to an experimental procedure designed to artificially enhance his brain to a posthuman level. The process drives him insane.

The summary gets complicated at this point, with Menelaus’ point-of-view leapfrogging forward nearly two hundred years to witness the aftermath of his expedition. While Menelaus is undoubtedly the protagonist, his PoV makes for a very poor reader vehicle. His perspective drops in and out and is complicated by his self-induced insanity. He could be considered an unreliable narrator by some standards, as the Menelaus who we begin the book with is very clearly not the Menelaus we finish with.

Much of the book is also consumed with a particularly egregious kind of technobabble in the form of the higher order maths of alien communication. The Monument, an alien maguffin covered in undecipherable writing, supposedly contains the secrets of the universe. But every time one of the characters starts going on about the complex formulas it contains, my eyes just start glazing over. I am, admittedly, not a math person, but much of the discussion of these higher order maths seems to be either fictional and therefore unnecessary to detail in the narrative, or just wrong and stupid. I had originally wanted to find a more math-savvy reader to go over these sections for me, but barring that, I would be very interested in any of my reader’s thoughts on this obnoxious math-babble

Another, more serious problem lies in the construction of the greater EschatonSequence’s structure. Count to a Trillion is, at best, a prologue to a greater story of humanity struggling to find its place in a hostile universe. The events of Trillion reveal the existence of several overwhelmingly powerful alien empires spanning the nearby galaxies. Montrose’s expedition has started a countdown to their arrival and subsequent subjugation of the human race. The broader implications of these events are barely touched upon in this book, but feature heavily in the preview of the next book, The Hermetic Millennia. The upshot of all this is that Count to a Trillion is largely pointless. Aside from developing Menelaus as a character (and not a terribly well drawn one) there is no actual reason to read Trillion.

When combined with John C. Wright’s poor narrative and unacceptable caricature that is the book’s only major female character, Princess Raina, this core issue forms the base of an almost unsurmountable obstacle to a favorable recommendation. In spite of that, there are some interesting pieces here. The Hermetic Millennia seems to be a much more interesting story, better expressing Wright’s ambitious goals with its exploration of a humanity rapidly evolving, socially and technologically, to face the challenges of the future. Keep in mind that I haven’t read Hermetic Millennia at this point, so this is more a hope than a real recommendation. What Trillion does have going for it is a strong snapshot of several possible hard SF futures. Both post-war backwater and post-sustenance utopia are depicted well here, and there is something hopeful about the transition from one to the other, despite the book’s negative context.

Count to a Trillion is clearly not for everyone, but fans of hard SF and math types might get more out of it than I did. To anyone else, don’t bother reading this book.

When last we left Dial H, Miéville was busy adding weird fiction and horror tropes to a little known corner of the DC Universe. The events of the last volume have raised the stakes and opened the door to a multiverse of possibilities. Unfortunately, while Dial H was an incredible critical success, its sales numbers left something to be desired and DC ended the run at issue 16. True to form, Miéville seems to treat the cancelation as a challenge and crashes through two storylines to bring readers a climax worthy of this creative adventure, and a thoughtful coda that hints that we might not have seen the last of the Dialers.

Issue #7 picks up a few weeks after Nelson’s fight with the villain Ex Nihlio and her pet Abyss. In light of the new threat of the Shadow on the Line, Nelson and his new partner Roxie, set off to uncover more secrets of the dials. But their leisurely globetrotting quickly turns scary as they catch the eye of a Canadian super-agent who knows more about what they are than they do.

Exchange is actually a double volume, collecting the Centipede arc that I summarized above, and the Exchange arc that follows. Centipede introduces us to Dial Cults and the secret Canadian agency that has been experimenting with a dial of their own. While this arc is satisfying, and the Centipede is a brilliantly written and realized villain, the really interesting stuff doesn’t kick in until DCs deadline forced Miéville to sprint for the finish in the Exchange arc.

From the end of issue #12, the tone of the series changes. There’s a sense of impending catastrophe that permeates the frames as the newly assembled Dial Bunch race to find the origin of the dials. Miéville starts tossing terminology and worldbuilding elements at the page almost too fast to process. The hectic crescendo of plot comes at the expense of some of the more subtle themes of the first volume. Nelson’s exploration of what it is to be a hero, and the complicated, evolving relationship between Nelson and Roxie take a back seat to the mythology of the Dial War, the Exchange and the mysterious Operator behind it all.

The pacing of these last issues is off-putting, but also exciting, dragging the reader on a manic ride through a universe that should have taken more time to discover and explore. It’s not everything it should have been, but the race to the conclusion is surprisingly satisfying. The added urgency pressurizes the literary components, glossing over flaws that might otherwise distract from the goal. The result is a bit like blown glass; beautiful, but flawed and fragile.

Rereading the collected book for this review exposed a lot of unanswered questions and minor gaps in my understanding of Miéville’s concepts that I hadn’t noticed during my first pass of the comics as individual issues. The goals of the Operator are unclear and the final confrontation, while exciting to read, leaves things on an odd, anticlimactic cliffhanger. The Justice League coda helps defray the non-ending, reintroducing the dials to the primary DC universe and adding a new character who might make some future appearances in The New 52 (fingers crossed).

In spite of the rushed ending, Miéville really did bring something fascinating to DC’s otherwise lackluster reboot. The thoughtful exploration of what it is to be a hero from the first volume and the expansion of dial lore from the third arc are both strong literary reasons to read the series. The art is excellent, as are the character designs. Both the ordinary people populating the Dial H universe, and the weird and sometimes hilarious superheroes called up to do battle, are well realized and evoke a real sense of humanity and madcap comic action respectively. I was particularly impressed by the string of villains featured in the Justice League coda. They strike a fun balance between scary and amusing very reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoon bad guys.

Like many more ‘artistic’ comic projects, this isn’t exactly what the everyday fan of superhero comics is probably looking for. But if China Miéville is in your wheelhouse, or you enjoy a weirder take on heroes and villains, Dial H is an excellent short comic, perfect for the curious reader.

A Drifting Life is a wonderfully thick tome of a graphic novel. Equal parts autobiography, national history and understated drama; the book chronicles the story of one of the founding fathers of Japanese Manga. The style pioneered by Yoshihiro Tatsumi was one of the first attempts to turn cartoons into a medium for serious works. Appropriately, his story is a serious one, touching on the themes of artistic integrity and the struggles of living in postwar Japan. It is an exquisite novel, and only feels unfocused because that’s how life sometimes is.

While A Drifting Life is an autobiography, Tatsumi authored the book as if it were about someone else. His fictional stand in, Hiroshi Katsumi, is the central protagonist, and a brief editor’s note remarks that a number of other names have been changed. The book picks up at the end of World War II with the surrender of Emperor Hirohito. Hiroshi is ten and has already developed a love of Manga and drawing. Along with his brother, Oki, Hiroshi starts on the path of a Manga-ka, submitting amateur comic strips to various publishing houses. To his surprise, he is published.

As the book follows Hiroshi’s growth as a person and as an artist, the narrator keeps us abreast of cultural events in Japan. Famous events, movies and movements bookend segments of Hiroshi’s life, chronicling his inspirations and influences. They also paint a picture of life in American-occupied Japan and the following periods of economic growth. The book is as much a history of Manga and entertainment in Japan as it is an autobiography, but that history is filtered through the lens of Tatsumi’s life and experiences. The result is a very specific slideshow of the time period, providing context to the actual story without eclipsing it or bogging it down.

Unsurprisingly, the art is excellent. Tatsumi’s style blends simplistic characters and faces with very realistically rendered scenery and set pieces. The historical asides are peppered with images from famous movie posters, book covers and newspaper photographs. At the same time, the art doesn’t look like traditional Manga. The faces are simple, but realistically proportioned. No giant eyes or absent noses. The style is distinctly Tatsumi’s, evoking his The Push Man and Hitokuigyo. It may seem a little sloppy from time to time, but there is a charm to this earnest portrayal of Hiroshi; slightly silly looking, but still realistic.

One thing that really struck me was how complete Hiroshi’s story feels. While it is obvious that much of the day to day minutia of his life is being omitted, it still feels like we are seeing a very honest and full portrayal of the life of a real person. A Drifting Life shows Hiroshi as someone whose life is consumed by Manga. We see so much of his life because all of it is important to this story of an artist struggling to find his unique artistic voice in an industry that rewards a certain degree of mass production and conformity. While his contemporaries were writing slapstick comedies, Hiroshi/Tatsumi was trying to establish a style that felt more cinematic and had room for drama, suspense and action.

There is a sense of futility that haunts both the life and work of Hiroshi, no doubt emblematic of the frustrations that Tatsumi encountered over the course of his career. His inability to pin down his style of Gekiga while working for various publishers is compelling, and familiar to anyone who has tried to express themselves artistically. And that’s why you should read this book, even if you’ve never heard of Manga before. At its core, A Drifting Life is about striving to create something that meets your own standards. I can think of few books that express just how hard that process can be as well as A Drifting Life.

I’ve waxed somewhat philosophical here, or perhaps just aesthetical, but the book really is quite good. And there is something I find immensely satisfying about reading a heavy book. A Drifting Life scratches that itch both literally and metaphorically. Heavy with history, with the honest measure of a life and heavy with the legacy of a truly magnificent artist.

]]>https://deconcrit.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/cbr6-review-19-a-drifting-life/feed/0LyrinoirA Drifting Life